October 25th, 2006
On “Murder, we said”
My response to the Editorial “Murder, we said” by Jug Suraiya in The Times of India:
The editorial puts an interesting spin on capital punishment.
But the same logic you apply to urge Indians to look down upon capital punishment, almost calling it immoral but at least suggesting it to be inhuman, can be applied to any punishment…
Why should state have the right to ‘murder’ a criminal you ask. So I ask:
- Why should state have the right to ‘try’ anybody for any crime?
- Why should state spend my tax money to feed and tend to ‘criminals’?
- Why should state lock up anybody?
Just because capital punishment ‘kills’ you call it murder from your standpoint of this notion of right of life. So doesn’t locking up prisoners infringe on their right to be free? Who is a judge or a law to decide if a person will be allowed to roam free or locked up in a small room, and for how long?
You say capital punish is not an able deterrent. Is any other punishment? So why have punishments at all? Let’s just keep a public record of reprimands a person has been given for committing what we, for now, call ‘crimes’ and hope that public embarrassment will keep people from committing them. But then, somebody will write a song about how somebody got inspired into collecting most such reprimands and you will label this system a failure too, perhaps even calling it an inhuman infringement of a person’s human right not to be publicly embarrassed.
If you dare dismiss the above with a wave of your hand, perhaps calling it an over-reaction or irrelevant, or try to walk the fine line of how it is OK to do anything but take one’s life or be ‘barbaric’ in meting out punishment, I question you on your definition and notion of this inhumanity. If it’s inhumanity to you to infringe a person’s right to life, perhaps to some so is the infringement of a person’s right to freedom. Where does it stop?
So who are you to suggest a person’s life be spared when that person did not care in taking another’s in whatever emotional state of being? Call capital punishment revenge or call it state sponsored murder if it gives you satisfaction and a moral high-ground from where to scream at us barbaric inhumans while we rejoice when a killer is killed in revenge/justice.